The owners of popular music have only recently embraced downloading digital copies of their copyrighted works over electronic networks such as the internet. One popular website for doing so is http://www.apple.com/itunes/, wherein users visit the website via a personal computer (PC) or the like, manually select a song title, and download a digital version (e.g., MP3, AAC) of the selected song to the PC they used to visit the website. The user then plays the songs on the PC or transfers them to a portable device such as an iPod® or other dedicated digital music player.
A second generation of music downloading technology has recently been brought to market, wherein the user need not manually select a song by its title on a web page. Instead, the song is ‘listened’ to by a server or other computer associated with a website, and digitally analyzed to identify that particular song from among a database of digital music. For example, the website http://shazam.com/uk/do/help_faqs shazam#4 explains its operation as follows. A user hearing a song, such as in a pub or an auto, enters a code in his/her mobile station (MS) while the song is playing. The song is sent to a hosting website such as shazam.com over a standard MS link, just as a voice input would be sent. That is, the message transmitted from the MS to the shazam.com site is the input analog music sample converted by a vocoder of the MS as any input to the microphone would be converted. The hosting website receives the (converted) raw music input, analyzes it, and matches it to one of the songs in its database. The Shazam.com technology appears limited to identifying a song at a server using a mobile station as merely a conduit that converts an analog input to digital and packetizes the converted signal, and reporting the results back to the mobile station. Further, since the Shazam.com technology does not appear to process a sample for identification purposes until after a wireless link is established, a user hearing only a latter portion of a song may not have the link established before the song ends.
Most music download services are accessed via a Personal Computer, but also mobile Over-The-Air (OTA) download services have been introduced. Mobile equipment carries limitations regarding small screen size, limited power supply, reliability and speed of data connection, which makes music discovery and delivery of the music from a music service to the mobile terminal challenging. Normally, true music service has a music collection of at least 500 000 songs. Exploring that size of music catalogue is difficult using a mobile device user interface where sequential presentation must fit the content to the screen. This makes hierarchies deep and music discovery difficult.
It is common for people to hear music in a public place, such as a pub or concert hall or car radio. Traditionally, a person becomes interested in some particular piece of music, but does not know the song's title. The person then asks friends, record shop sales staff, or happen to hear the song's name from a radio broadcast to find out the artist and title to identify the song. Some individuals may use the Shazam.com site (above) to identify the song by calling an associated service number and playing the song over their mobile station as a live ‘broadcast’. The person then goes to a record store or buys the song from an Internet service based on the identification returned by Shazam.com or similar identifications service. However, there are always the following steps: 1) Hear the music sample (stimulus); 2) Identify the song; 3) Find the song for purchase (based on the identification); 4) Purchase a copy of the song; and 5) Delivery of the purchased copy and adding it to a personal music collection.
Steps 1) through 3) are manual in traditional methods. Internet-based music purchasing automates steps 4) and 5). Services such as Shazam.com automates step 2) based on an electronic ‘hearing’ at step 1). However, all prior art approaches known to the inventors for performing the above steps involve manual steps by the person who wishes to identify and purchase a copy of the song. The present invention seeks to streamline and automate more of the above process.
Because a greater quantity of digital files are being created and stored, there has arisen a need to standardize the way in which digital files are identified. MPEG-7 is being developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) to standardize the representation of information that identifies the content of multi-media files. This is opposed to information that is the content itself, which is less amenable to categorizing and searching in databases. Whether or not MPEG-7 becomes a standardized approach, it describes a developing set of tools to efficiently index, search, and retrieve multimedia files. Such tools are used herein in an exemplary fashion in the below description of how the present invention automates the identification and purchase of music or other media.